History has never halted for want of peasants. But crucial as they may have been to Europe's agricultural well-being, they weren't exactly well loved by nobility. Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century, tells us they were considered
aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous... in satiric tales it was said the [peasant's] soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refus...
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